He sent Dolores out and sat with his head in his hands. Why, oh, why hadn’t he been left in the Guard? He had been happy there; he had understood the world he was in.
Then he straightened up and did something he had been putting off; he returned a vuecall from his grandparents. He had been expected to visit them long since, but he had felt compelled to try to learn his job first.
Indeed he was welcome! “Hurry, son — we’ll be waiting.” It was a wonderful hop across prairie and the mighty Mississippi (small from that height) and over city-pocked farmland to the sleepy college town of Valley View, where sidewalks were stationary and time itself seemed slowed. His grandparents’ home, imposing for Valley View, was homey after the awesome halls of Rudbek.
But the visit was not relaxing. There were guests at dinner, the president of the college and department heads, and many more after dinner — some called him “Rudbek of Rudbek,” others addressed him uncertainly as “Mr. Rudbek,” and still others, smug with misinformation as to how the nabob was addressed by familiars, simply as “Rudbek.” His grandmother twittered around, happy as only a proud hostess can be, and his grandfather stood straight and addressed him loudly as “Son.”
Thorby did his best to be a credit to them. He soon realized that it was not what he said but the fact of talking to Rudbek that counted.
The following night, which his grandmother reluctantly kept private, he got a chance to talk. He wanted advice.
First information was exchanged. Thorby learned that his father, on marrying the only child of his grandfather Rudbek, had taken his wife’s family name. “It’s understandable,” Grandfather Bradley told him. “Rudbek has to have a Rudbek. Martha was heir but Creighton had to preside — board meetings and conferences and at the dinner table for that matter. I had hoped that my son would pursue the muse of history, as I have. But when this came along, what could I do but be happy for him?”
His parents and Thorby himself had been lost as a consequence of his father’s earnest attempt to be in the fullest sense Rudbek of Rudbek — he had been trying to inspect as much of the commercial empire as possible. “Your father was always conscientious and when your Grandfather Rudbek died before your father completed his apprenticeship, so to speak, Creighton left John Weemsby in charge — John is, I suppose you know, the second husband of your other grandmother’s youngest sister Aria — and Leda, of course, is Aria’s daughter by her first marriage.”
“No, I hadn’t known.” Thorby translated the relationships into Sisu terms . . . and reached the startling conclusion that Leda was in the other moiety! — if they had such things here, which they didn’t. And Uncle Jack — well, he wasn’t “uncle” — but how would you say it in English?
“John had been a business secretary and factotum to your other grandfather and he was the perfect choice, of course; he knew the inner workings better than anyone, except your grandfather himself. After we got over the shock of our tragic loss we realized that the world must go on and that John could handle it as well as if he had been Rudbek himself.”
“He’s been simply wonderful!” grandmother chirped.
“Yes, he has. I must admit that your grandmother and I became used to a comfortable scale of living after Creighton married. College salaries are never what they should be; Creighton and Martha were very generous. Your grandmother and I might have found it difficult after we realized that our son was gone, never to come back, had not John told us not to worry. He saw to it that our benefit continued just as before.”
“And increased it,” Grandmother Bradley added emphatically.
“Well, yes. All the family — we think of ourselves as part of Rudbek family even though we bear a proud name of our own — all of the family have been pleased with John’s stewardship.”
Thorby was interested in something other than “Uncle Jack’s” virtues. “You told me that we left Akka, jumping for Far-Star, and never made it? That’s a long, long way from Jubbul.”